Here at Nasuni, we are all for virtualization. The move away from physical hardware to virtual hardware, or the consolidation of boxes into virtual machines, gives you an enormous amount of flexibility in your data center and ends up consuming far less power and space. It’s obvious why virtualization is so popular right now. Of course, we are also deploying a virtual machine ourselves, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we support this larger technology flow.
Yet there is another trend in the space that concerns us: paravirtualization. Some of the big vendors are either strongly recommending or requiring that you install their tools or drivers inside the virtual machines you have running on their platforms. In some cases these tools can provide valuable functionality – dynamic machine migration from VMware, for one – and speed up a system considerably. Still, we think that requiring these add-ons goes against one of the core principles that have made virtualization such an enormous success. Virtualization technology shouldn’t be restrictive. It should allow anything to run inside those virtual machines.
Paravirtualization should be an option, not a requirement. Users should be allowed to pick where they fall along the virtualization/paravirualization spectrum. If they don’t want these added features, they should not have to use them. Now, VMware supports full virtualization as a baseline, then offers added features as an option. This is the way to go. Users need to retain that flexibility.
The point of virtualization is to emulate physical hardware. And whatever is running inside that hardware should not require any custom drivers or software. It should look and feel like hardware, and be completely independent. Otherwise, you end up with annoying concerns about software updates, licensing, and other unnecessary complexities. These add-ons could end up restricting the ability of people to grow and deploy virtual machines.
Obviously, we have a strong concern here because the Filer is a virtual appliance. We built our own virtual machine, we test it, and we qualify it with the different platforms we support. Having to deal with multiple, conflicting paravirtualization patches from different vendors complicates that process unnecessarily.
We are currently working on getting the Filer to run on additional VM platforms, so this issue is very much on our minds at the moment. Have any concerns or questions of your own? Reach out to us at feedback@nasuni.com.